I never really associated Kenny Rogers with food (well, except maybe "four hungry children & a crop in the field"..), but according to my sister, the chicken at his Kenny Rogers Roasters restaurants was excellent. And, in fact, from what I can tell from this Wikipedia article, there was a Seinfeld episode based around that fact.

The article is quite vague about what happened to the chain. At one point they were doing well, having just bought out a troublesome competitor and gone public with over 1000 restaurants, and a few sentences later they are in Chapter 11. Today, apparently almost all the stores are in Asia.

The Chapter 11 came in 1998, but the Harbison store was already a Bojangles at that point, so I'm just leaving the closing date as mid 1990s.

After that closed, a bar called Stingers set up shop, and I totally missed the fact that it had closed until *its* follow-on operation, Marinoni's had also closed.

Actually it may not be strictly accurate to say that Stingers closed. According to this Free Times story, the same owner ran both restaurants, so it's more accurate to say that Stingers transitioned into Marinoni's. Unfortunately, I never got to either, and I have to say the pizza described in The Free Times sounds really good.

This building just north of I-20 at the corner of Fairfield & Sharpe Roads has apparently been quite a number of things according to google, though mostly iterations of bar/restaurant and grocery. Brown's was the last tenant, or at least anyone after them never repainted, but I cannot find any active listing in my 1997 or 2007-2012 phonebooks, so I'm just leaving the closing date as "2000s".

The lot is a little bit overgrown, but the building still seems to be in pretty good shape. It wouldn't surprise me for somebody else to give it a go here.

This Cayce home cooking restaurant was at the corner of State & Jansen Streets, right across from Brookland Cayce High School, and right next to the old radio station studio. As you can tell, these pictures were taken on a very grey and gloomy day, otherwise the old brick building would look much more inviting.

I know for a while they advertised themselves online as either the follow-on or alternative operation to the old Southern Skillet when that restaurant closed.

In the event I had never heard of them until quite recently, and never got around to checking them out until it was too late.

I believe I am going to skip the actual "Columbia Closings" Columbia scenes calendar this year, being as nobody bought one last year :-( and do two Pawleys Island calendars.

The first of those is here, or is available by clicking on the picture below. You can get it in either standard 8.5x11 format or oversized format, and you can pick your starting date when you order. (That means all the previous calendars can be had with 2013 dates as well!).

Last year, a work friend of mine and her husband were driving from DC to Florida with a sidetrip to Clemson, and would be coming through Columbia on I-26. She suggested we meet for lunch, and wanting to give her a fairly straight shot off of and onto the Interstate, I suggested Al Amir on Saint Andrews road with Harbison as the connector.

"You can't miss it," I told them, "the restaurant is kind of below street level, but just go to the strip mall with the coffee kiosk in the front of the parking lot!"

The punchline is, of course, that when I got out there to meet them, I saw the kisok was gone, and they confirmed when they finally got there that they had had a Dickens of a time with my directions, and that point in particular...

Now, the kiosk, or another similar one under the name of Loveland Coffee, is coming back.

I may well buy a cup there -- but I don't think I'll include it in my directions!

According to their phone ad, PAL Travel has been around since 1976. Since this year's phonebook came out (February 2012), they have elected to consolidate with the AAA Folks at 4526 Forest Drive. You may recall that address as it was very nearly totally destroyed by fire a while back, the results of which you can see at the link.

Those stores have now been re-purposed. This store which I found in Orlando on Sandlake Road opposite a huge mall, as of August had not been. In fact, all the fixtures and some of the office equipment are still in place just as if the book supply truck could pull up any minute.

The distinctive look of a Borders puts me in a nostalgic mood, as though I might once more spend my Kansas City evenings there, drinking coffee and poring over racks of books I could never find in Columbia, Fayetteville or Aiken, or leafing through low circulation magazines I had known of only by repute until seeing them there.